Category: Archaeology

Sciencing up the place

I got back late Saturday from the SaSci/SCCR conference in Las Vegas, to be greeted in Detroit by several inches of new-fallen snow … oh joy! Although I hardly had the time or inclination to do any serious gambling while away, I did win modestly at the airport slots due to my flight being delayed for half an hour. My talk was sparsely attended but nonetheless well-received, and it looks like as a result of these discussions, I’ll be presenting next year at the same conference as part of a session on anthropology and numerical cognition (in other words, exactly my field). In general, discussions about methodology in cognitive anthropology have led me to think quite a bit about my upcoming work this summer working with Detroit middle school students and learning about mathematical concept formation. A real challenge in the anthropology of mathematics is that there aren’t very many anthropologists working on mathematics, and because mathematics is a weird sort of domain where referents are often abstract, our methodologies aren’t extremely well developed, as opposed to, say, the study of kinship terms or ethnobotanical knowledge. So I have been spending the past few days thinking a lot more seriously about elicitation tasks and what exactly a mathematics-oriented ethnographic interview ought to look like and how on earth I can/should apply any of the highly theoretical knowledge I have acquired to this very grounded situation. Of course, I won’t really have the slightest clue what I’m doing until I actually start doing it, and possibly not even then.

But more generally, and despite receiving other, unrelated good news while away, it’s hard to be back from this particular conference feeling unmitigatedly positive about my discipline and my particular orientation within it. I’ve always been an oddball (and usually proud of it) in that I refuse to define myself within the usual four-field subdisciplinary taxonomy (physical, archaeological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology) common for the past century. I just don’t see any point, insofar as most of what ought to distinguish archaeologists from cultural anthropologists (e.g.) is methodological rather than conceptual. But then inevitably we get caught up in what is versus what ought to be, and the ways in which methodologies affect all other aspects of our work, and then we end up yellling at one another instead of being productive.

On top of that, you add the division between anthropology-as-humanism and anthropology-as-science, where I lean rather heavily towards the latter perspective even though as a ‘labelled’ linguistic anthropologist most of my attributed subfield leans the other way. The Science Wars had enormous fissioning effects on anthropology, such that some departments actually split administratively between humanistic and scientific wings, but some of that fissioning exists at a subdisciplinary level as well: you would be hard-pressed to find a physical anthropologist who rejects the label ‘scientist’, for instance. The Society for Anthropological Sciences is both a symptom of and a potential solution to these issues: it reflects a profound dissatisfaction with the humanistic bent of most cultural and linguistic anthropology, but at the same time by organizing itself in opposition to those trends, does little to convince any non-scientific anthropologists of the merits of the perspective.

For my part, I’m quite happy to use humanistic approaches when relevant, which is often. A lot of the empirical work underlying my forthcoming book, Numerical Notation: A Comparative History, examines the social, cultural, and political contexts under which particular numerical systems arose, spread, and declined. Lots of the work is essentially epigraphy as applied to numbers, and the scholars I relate to are linguists, historians, classicists, etc. In terms of much of my analysis, historians would surely recognize it as akin to what they do, even if, by the nature of the subject, it tends to underemphasize the individual personalities involved.

But I can’t escape the feeling that all this humanistic analysis acquires greater relevance when embedded in the broader search for patterns, and within anthropology the analysis of social processes and the comparison of social systems. I am thrilled that the structure of the book retains the basic structure of my dissertation, which has two separate analytical chapters, one cognitive, the other social, neither of which stands alone. But ultimately it is a comparative history, one which seeks to transcend the particular and get at something pan-human underlying it all. For an anthropologist today to admit to being a comparativist, outside of a very small number of venues, is like admitting you’re a cannibal, it seems sometimes. I do think I see some glimmers of hope that the field is becoming methodologically and theoretically more inclusive than when I was a grad student. I guess we’ll see, when the book is out, whether the reviewers agree.

Dept. of Arcane Prehistory, Maple Leaf edition

The Globe and Mail reports today on the thinking of retired chemistry professor / amateur archaeologist Gordon Freeman, who believes that Canada’s Stonehenge lies in southern Alberta.

I admit that the first thing I thought of when I heard about this is the ridiculous Canadian B-movie The Final Sacrifice ‘Rowsdower!’, which received a hilarious Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment, and whose plot features a cult that worships an ancient lost civilization in (you guessed it) southern Alberta.

The second thing I thought of, though, are the epistemological issues related to ancient science and mathematics. How do we establish whether something is a solar alignment, or a prehistoric representation of the Fibonacci sequence, or … something else, natural or manufactured? The study of ancient science runs the gamut from rigorous statistical analysis to a far more hermeneutic approach, and Freeman’s account clearly falls far on the latter side of the continuum, although the article provides some evidence of a systematic effort to catalogue aspects of the landscape that represent this knowledge.

For the record, while I have no doubt that the Plains hunter-foragers of several thousand years ago had some astronomical knowledge, and while that knowledge may (or may not) have been encoded on the landscape, the article is not much more than pseudoscientific speculation. We have no reason to believe that all the features of the landscape identified are even human-altered, much less used contemporaneously, and still less used contemporaneously as representations of celestial objects or events. The fact that the initial insight was apparently one based solely on intuition does not discredit the hypothesis (this is after all how most new science gets done) but the fact that Dr. Freeman has apparently not followed this up with anything resembling archaeological fieldwork is not especially convincing. Dr. Freeman’s site, Canada’s Stonehenge, doesn’t say anything about the methodology used or the specific conclusions reached, and certainly doesn’t contain any data.

Beyond that, the article has the rhetorical techniques in the pseudoarchaeologist’s toolkit: the mutually reinforcing tropes of the lone worker with an intuitive understanding of a complex problem and the hidebound academicians who through ignorance, jealousy, or bias, fail to perceive the fundamental truth of the new discovery. This image of scientific discovery has nothing to do with how any science, physical, life, or human, really works – even where there is novelty, it is always grounded in a foundation of prior knowledge (pace Kuhn). That Dr. Freeman further believes that this celestial alignment of features cures headaches and produces a sense of comfort and ease is also troubling. I will not comment on the relevance of this controversy involving Dr. Freeman’s political opinions on feminism – but you should read the link nonetheless. I have no doubt that this latest ‘finding’ will receive great attention in the public eye. But like most archaeology reporting in the media, and particularly reporting of topics in ancient science, we are entitled, I think, to more than a usual dose of skepticism.

Paleolinguistics and archaeolinguistics

There’s an absolutely fascinating post over at Language Log, by guest blogger Don Ringe, on the hypothetical-but-not-completely-unknowable state of linguistic diversity in Europe ‘between the end of the last ice age and the coming of the Indo-European languages’. It’s the sort of thing that absolutely should be read by anyone interested in the topic of paleolinguistics (the study of prehistoric languages) or more narrowly in Indo-European studies. I certainly plan to present it to my students, many of whom are archaeology students taking linguistic anthropology as part of a broad four-field anthropological education. Of particular importance is Ringe’s insistence that the once-popular notion that single languages (like proto-Indo-European) were spoken across wide areas of prehistoric Europe cannot be true, because populations that are not in contact with one another diverge linguistically without any specific motivation or cause. Linguistic diversity was certainly characteristic of all of European prehistory.

One challenge in getting linguists and archaeologists to talk to one another is that the sorts of data that they find persuasive are rather different. Paleolinguists look for evidence of regular patterns of phonetic change to reconstruct proto-languages like Proto-Indo-European, and use the existence of reconstructable words as evidence for the origins of particular languages and language families (as in the first paragraph of the section ‘The spread of Indo-European languages’). Archaeologists, on the other hand, focus on material cultural signatures of ethnic identity, demographic and subsistence shifts that correlate with migrations, and increasingly, DNA evidence. This presents some serious challenges to paleolinguistics as traditionally conceptualized as a part of historical linguistics, but also gets involved in ‘race-language-culture’ debates that not only raise epistemological issues for the study of the past, but also political ones. Absolutely no European scholar has forgotten the perils of assuming correlations between biology, language, and material culture of the sort typical prior to World War II. These issues have always been around, and aren’t going anywhere. At the same time, we know that linguistic evidence alone is only going to get us so far – we need good anthropological and archaeological knowledge about the way that societies (linguistic communities) work, in order to think meaningfully about the way that prehistoric social formations would have (and could not have) related to languages.

A fair amount of the literature that Ringe is citing reflects a sort of uneasy dance; Ringe’s own article focuses primarily on the linguistic evidence from reconstructed PIE as well as the early attested inscriptional evidence of Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. There are, and always will be, huge evidentiary gaps in our direct knowledge of prehistoric languages, however, and the archaeological record must have something to contribute to filling those gaps. Since developing and teaching a course at McGill in early 2007 on the prehistory of language and the mind, I have been giving a lot of thought to this issue, and Ringe’s post has given me more to think about.

Pseudo-archaeo-linguistics in review

Happy New Year! I’m hoping to be posting at least once a week over the next term, so stay tuned. I have a couple of longer posts in various states of semi-composition, but for now I wanted to mention to you that over at Archaeoporn, there is a fascinating list of the top 10 pseudo-archaeological subjects of 2008. Of particular note for readers of this blog, or in general for those interested in pseudoscience related to archaeological decipherment, are #5 (the earliest Hebrew writing), which I wrote about, and which is pseudoarchaeological only in the sense that some of the claims lavished upon this poor ostracon are so wild, and #1 (the purported Sumerian clay tablet documenting the Köfels ‘impact’ in Austria), which I haven’t written about, but which is so bizarre as to defy any sensible explanation (check out this skeptical essay, for instance).

Review: Archaeoastronomy

Archaeoastronomy, the subdiscipline, is the study of the relationship between ancient material culture and ancient beliefs and behaviours with respect to phenomena in the sky. Archaeoastronomy, the blog, is the web presence of Ph.D candidate Alun Salt, who is a classical archaeoastronomer (Salt and Boutsikas 2005) and in my opinion, one of today’s finest public thinkers on matters related to ancient science. I’ve never met him nor even corresponded with him, but the Archaeoastronomy blog (in its various incarnations over the years) has been a regular source of interest for me for some time.

The trick about archaeoastronomy is that it is really an effort to reconstruct prehistoric cognition, which is a very tricky task given the limitations of the archaeological record. It is thus generally a part of the broader subfield of cognitive archaeology (Renfrew and Zubrow 1994) and cognitive anthropology (d’Andrade 1995), of which I consider myself to be a part. It is practically self-evident that the cross-cultural study of astronomy and the cross-cultural study of mathematics have much in common. The central issues of cognitive archaeology are epistemological in nature. How do we reliably obtain knowledge of ancient astronomical concepts given only the record of megalithic architecture, pictographic star-charts, and (if we are very fortunate) ancient (but easily misinterpreted) texts? And how do we, as fallible scientists, distinguish patterns that were meaningful to ancient peoples from the archaeological equivalent of Rorshach tests, patterns constructed by the archaeologist out of random noise? Establishing that the alignment of a particular archaeological feature with a particular astronomical event was intentional and meaningful is exceptionally difficult, which is one of the reasons why archaeoastronomy is more heavily burdened with pseudoscientific nonsense than practically any other endeavour.

This, I think, is why the Archaeoastronomy blog is so timely: it doesn’t retreat from this challenge, but instead helps the reader to see how the act of interpretation is fraught with peril, and yet it can be done. Alun Salt’s description of the field is perhaps the clearest I’ve ever read. Beyond this, it illustrates the political and social dimensions of interpretation in a field where attributing great works to one’s putative ancestors is part of keeping the public’s interest. And beyond that still, it’s a well-written and sometimes hilarious blog that neither sinks to the lowest common denominator nor appeals only to the specialist. It hasn’t been as active lately as one would like (something about finishing a dissertation, I hear …) but it is an extraordinary and fascinating resource.

Posts of interest
Monet the astronomer
The Antikythera Mechanism
Inspired by Nebra

Works cited
Aveni, A. F. 2001. Skywatchers. University of Texas Press.
D’Andrade, R. 1995. The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge University Press.
Renfrew, C., and E. B. W. Zubrow. 1994. The Ancient Mind: Elements of Cognitive Archaeology. Cambridge University Press.
Salt, A., and E. Boutsikas. 2005. Knowing when to consult the oracle at Delphi. Antiquity 79, no. 305: 564-572.